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EQUELLA

EQUELLA is a web-based digital repository that provides one central location for the delivery of a diverse range of content including learning and teaching, research, institutional governance, library, and ICT (Information and Communication Technologies). EQUELLA has been deployed for copyright resource collections; research materials; managing and exposing materials through websites and portals; content authoring; workflow; institutional policy; and organizational resources.

EQUELLA was developed specifically for educational institutions over the last 15 years as a Java platform. It is currently in use in a wide range of schools, universities, colleges, TAFEs, departments of education, government agencies, and corporations worldwide.

Open Source Digital Respository

EQUELLA manages online learning content and makes it available to students and instructors in a variety of ways. By using EQUELLA to create, store, and share digital materials and power teaching and learning repositories, institutions worldwide are increasing access, affordability, and achievement.

Content Discovery

EQUELLA is a powerful digital repository that can store and manage a range of different content types. By centralizing search and access of learning content into a single institutional repository, schools, colleges, and universities enjoy a variety of benefits:

LMS Integrations

Many institutions use EQUELLA as an integrated tool to discover, contribute, and import content into their courses. EQUELLA comes with integration functionality and a comprehensive API toolkit that enable institutions to maximize their investment by incorporating EQUELLA's learning objects across their eLearning infrastructure. Connecting an institutional repository with an LMS offers many advantages:

- Provides easy access for multiple users

- Simultaneously integrates with multiple learning management systems

- Switching LMS with EQUELLA eases transition from one learning management system to another

- Improves content efficiency

- Push course content to LMS

- Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI)

- Integration experience enhancements

- Integration with major LMSs

Standards and Outcomes

EQUELLA enables users to discover learning content based on standards and outcomes. Institutions are implementing EQUELLA to raise the visibility and usage of high quality and relevant content, enabling educators to make sure students are studying and learning with the most effective and engaging materials available. EQUELLA enables institutions to:

- Align content to standards

- Increase student success and achievement

- Accessibility

- Language Pack Support

Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning materials - from single pieces of content to entire courses and programs - that are publicly available for all to use, and principally through Creative Commons licensing, are legally available for repurposing, modifying, and improving. EQUELLA's integration support for cloud services enables users to utilize powerful capabilities for seamlessly searching for, storing and consuming OER content on the cloud. With EQUELLA, institutions can:

- Schedule systematic imports, or harvests, of open content from a variety of sources

- Apply custom tagging preferences or metadata schema to the harvested open content

- Increase the discovery and usage of open content among educational communities

- Save students money on course materials by judiciously mixing OER into the content mix

- Better determine the quality of OER by enabling users to add comments and ratings to the content

- Track the usage of open content alongside licensed and user-generated content, to help determine the best learning materials across an entire academic program

Associated Services for EQUELLA

Discovery Service for EQUELLA

Unicon professionals work closely with the client to gain clarity on project vision and goals, including the client's objectives for a digital repository. Activities include a review of current content needs / processes / infrastructure, meetings with stakeholders, and other foundational work required to move into the next part of the project with confidence and efficiency.

The Discovery phase sets the stage for the client engagement, articulating what a successful project outcome will look like. For existing EQUELLA implementations, Unicon can perform a health check as part of the Discovery phase. The Unicon team will review the client's existing implementation and match that against the stated content needs and goals of the organization.

The outcome of the Discovery Service is the documentation of needs and goals within the organization, a common understanding of the current technical portfolio and desired direction, the establishment of a project plan for project deliverables, and knowledge transfer of the foundational project components to the client team.

No

Deployment and Configuration Services for EQUELLA

Sound strategy and careful preparation are required to successfully deploy EQUELLA. Deployment services include evaluation, architecture design, hardware sizing, system implementation, customization, integration, and support for client applications. Unicon excels at deploying open source software, which not only saves time, but gives the confidence that comes with a professional EQUELLA installation. First, Unicon collects and documents system details, such as the operating platform and authentication source, and creates a custom installation package. Once EQUELLA is deployed, the Services Team runs a series of test scripts to ensure the platform is working from a functional and technical perspective. The result is a fully operational digital repository that has been professionally configured to maximize performance and stability.

No

Consulting Services for EQUELLA

Unicon's consulting services help in completing or advising organizations on how to take full advantage of EQUELLA to meet their business objectives. Unicon assigns an experienced Project Manager to oversee expert project teams as they work to deploy and support custom enterprise EQUELLA instances that solve business challenges. Unicon’s experienced configuration and development experts can meet aggressive deadlines, even when integrating EQUELLA with several different systems.

Unicon can also provide general EQUELLA mentorship. This affords organizations access to a Unicon developer/consultant experienced in working with EQUELLA. Consultants are made available to assist and mentor staff. Types of mentoring activities include: answering questions, helping staff execute on configuration of the system, customization of the solution, performing research, and producing documentation. Mentorship assists in knowledge transfer to enhance the client’s expertise in the development and maintenance of EQUELLA.

No

Customization Services for EQUELLA

As the EQUELLA solution is open source, it can be customized to meet the specific needs of an organization. While the solution has been architected with flexibility in mind, Unicon’s customization services can also be employed to meet the growing and diverse needs of each organization. Clients can enlist Unicon to create customized implementations that meet specific business needs.

Unicon offers expertise in how to leverage existing capabilities within the current EQUELLA version, as well as software engineering expertise to customize EQUELLA. Unicon's software engineering teams ensure timely delivery of projects using Agile and Scrum development methodologies, and have designed and implemented highly scalable and high performance architectures across several educational enterprise applications.

Upgrade Services for EQUELLA

As the open source community continues to make enhancements and adjustments to EQUELLA, new versions are released. These upgrades can be difficult for organizations to complete without a strong commercial vendor. Unicon’s services offer an ease of migration to the newest release of EQUELLA.

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Hosting Services for EQUELLA

Unicon provides hosting for EQUELLA on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Clients achieve time to market advantages, high levels of reliability and scalability, and demand-based sizing and costs when they take advantage of Unicon's AWS expertise. By hosting applications on AWS, Unicon helps clients keep their mission-critical operations running smoothly.

Managed Services

Unicon’s managed services are SLA-driven engagements that ensure critical IT services meet stakeholder reliability and availability needs, while achieving cost and staffing goals through experienced application expertise. Managed services adapt to meet variations in traffic, evolving with the changing business needs of clients and stakeholders to ensure cost-optimized operations. Managed services are comprised of both pro-active management and incident/ticket-based support. Pro-active management is applied to capacity planning, reliability/availability, and security posture of covered services. Also covered are the establishment of monitoring and instrumentation, incident response, and service desk requests.

Migration Services

Unicon’s migration services allow for existing EQUELLA instances to be transferred seamlessly over to the Unicon managed AWS environment. Unicon can complete a “lift and shift” migration or upgrade the EQUELLA instance to the latest release as part of this effort.

No

Support for EQUELLA

Protect the investment in EQUELLA and gain all of the advantages of this open source software plus top-quality, professional support from a commercial vendor. Unicon’s Open Source Support program is SLA-driven and backed by an accountable team of open source experts. Take advantage of a flexible, customizable open source support service with direct access to dedicated developers, consultants, and system administrators each possessing deep experience within the select open source projects. Get the backing of technical expertise and professional service all at an affordable price.

Support for EQUELLA can also be found through the Apereo community resources, which include: